What Flight MH370 tells us about International Terrorism and why the Internet is a damp tea-towel
Yellowcake hasn’t been publishing any articles recently because too much has been happening. Since Christmas and the release of Mikhail Khorkodovsky, Russia has been the main news story almost every day. Initially there was a draft for a piece about the Winter Olympics in Sochi and what a success they had been. The whole event was an undisputed PR triumph for Putin but it was the city of Sochi itself, with its beaches and snowy mountains, which emerged looking like the perfect holiday destination to the eyes of the watching world.
The Sochi project was abandoned when the situation in Ukraine deteriorated rapidly. A growing sense of outrage prompted an analysis of the Western media’s chronically biased reporting of the developing story. We as a western, democratic society have to find a way of allowing our own media sources to objectively report news events within the former Soviet states. Instead, we continue to persist with allowing the conveniently simplistic whitewash of good versus evil, east versus west and the rehash of outdated cold war rhetoric.
Reading the mainstream news, it is obvious that we, the public, are meant to ignore the fact that the democratically elected leadership (however flawed) of a sovereign state had been overthrown by an armed, undefined opposition with possible links to the far right. Again we in the West are expected to unquestionably support these largely unidentified freedom fighters in their fight against the pro-Russian indigenous local population. Why is that exactly?
Further distraction from the Ukrainian project came in the form of the inexplicable disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. It was heart breaking watching the families and friends of all the passengers and crew who are still currently waiting even now, desperate and powerless, for news. In the face of mounting conspiracy theories, the human tragedy never got the media attention it deserves. The cruel indignity of moving the Chinese families out of their hotels to make way for the Malaysian Grand Prix was unforgivable. The incident itself, however, is highlighting new and important international patterns of power relations and structures. None of them, it would seem, are particularly positive.
I know nothing about transponders, radar pings, flight corridors or the intricacies of a Boeing 777, but a tour of the internet’s hidden corners has, as usual, been fascinating, There are plenty of people out these in cyber space who understand these things, or at least, think they do. Anyone with a spare three days should take a tour through the discussion forums on PPRuNe Forums. Anyone planning on a hijack could also get themselves a sophisticated masterclass on exactly how to do it. The days of a self policing internet will come to an end soon, and this is one of the classic examples why. Too much information can be a dangerous thing. Everybody seems to be aware of Tor nowadays, which means the onion has layers we don’t yet have access to.
There is no end to the level of complex speculation and theorising over what exactly has happened to this plane. For those living under a rock, Malaysian Airways Flight MH 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur airport on Saturday 8th March headed for its final destination Beijing. Approximately 1 hour after take off it supposedly ceased all communications with air traffic control. Since then we have had a number of false dawns, a massive search and rescue operation of unprecedented scale and, rather humiliatingly for the Malaysian government, a series of US linked leaks of investigative information. This culminated in an excruciatingly embarrassing press conference; http://www.theguardian.com/world/feedarticle/11247793 where the Malaysian government confirmed that the plane communications had been switched off deliberately and the plane had continued to fly for up to 7 hrs after it went off radar. This means the plane could be, well, precisely anywhere. We have had spy satellites from China, Australia and France locating debris in the Indian Ocean, yet despite an even more intensive air and sea search we have found nothing. Radar pings supposedly from the aircrafts fading black box have narrowed the search down to a smaller area but still no physical remnants of the plane have been found and still no explanation as to why the plane ended up there, if indeed it did.
The internet to conspiracy theorists is like a warm, damp, three week old tea towel is to bacteria: a fertile breeding ground. Here are my top ten favourites so far.
There are more, some even involving extra terrestrials. It is quite terrifying how quickly we can fill a vacuum with nonsense because we have become used to 24 hr news feeds and we expect technological answers. The theory that refuses to go away is that of the Chinese Uighurs.
We are so conditioned now that we cannot understand how this plane be cannot be found, ‘The Americans can track a bumble bee’, ‘We can trace anything with GPS’ etc etc. We think everything can be monitored, traced and electronically finger printed. We believe in and depend on technology like never before.
And we are correct. The plane is probably not missing at all. All that is happening is that we, the media watching public, simply do not know where it is. The Chinese military know where it is, and more than likely the American Commander in Chief and his CIA/FBI teams know where it is too. They don’t actually have to tell us anything. What has happened though, is a series of embarrassing information leaks and penetrations. Technology’s ubiquitous presence allows information to escape the control systems. For example the radar pings were found by a British domestic satellite company, INMARSAT who reported it immediately to the world’s media. The Malaysian Aviation Authorities are clearly well out of the loop and it showed.
However, too many leaks and confusions have followed and the situation has now moved on, the simple mechanical malfunction or pilot error isn’t a feasible explanation, all analysis seem to point to deliberate action. Answers will have to be given, they need not be the truth though. The next few months will pass and perhaps some actual debris will turn up in the Indian Ocean and perhaps the pilot with his Anwar-political-axe to grind will be blamed and we will move on. Except just like 9/11, we will not actually be able to move on. Instead, the conspiracy theorist will continue to fill the internet with ‘what-really-happened-theories’. Human nature loves a mystery and the internet tea-towel facilitates the spread of them. What is interesting is that this time the conspiracy theories, however crack pot, are showing a trend, ‘Resource Terrorism’.
It is a consistent core Yellowcake value that geopolitical power over natural resources is how the world works. Ethnic, religious and ideological conflicts are convenient fronts and excuses for a means to control the planets’ valuable natural resources. Oil, gas, metals and uranium are the tools of real power distribution and more valuable than money itself. They are also finite and their mined locations are frequently zones of conflict as a result. This is why these locations are increasingly a key factor in international terrorism.
The American approach to the Middle East is not new territory. The hypocritical approach to the Ukraine is staggering in the face of Afghanistan. The US government had no UN mandate, yet invaded Afghanistan 2001, two years later the same thing happened in Iraq. Russia, in the face of a government destabilised by a western backed mob, merely redistributed the 22,000 navel troops already based at Sevastopol round the Crimea to secure the ethnic Russian population and their strategic interests. The USA invasions of Iraq are about resources, i.e oil. The situation in Afghanistan has been less clear. Previously, control of the worlds largest unregulated financial market, opiates, would have been a major motivation for invasion. However, it now transpires that tiny-dirt-poor Afghanistan sits on the world’s largest untapped copper reserves: estimated at some $4bn.
The number of conspiracies for the disappearance of flight MH370 is huge, and most of them concern international terrorism: from Chinese Uighurs to Israeli engineers to Iranian Jihadists. Some of these groups have previous form. In February this year in Kunming South West China 29 people were stabbed to death and over 130 injured. The attack was blamed on Xinjiang Uighur separatists. In China the Xinjiang Uighurs are generally reported as criminals; vicious and murderous. Their potential involvement in the disappearance of flight MH 370 would however be a marked escalation in scale of terrorist act, but not unprecedented. In 2008 a failed suicide bombing was attempted on a China Southern Airlines flight. In 2011 six Uighur men attempted and failed to hijack a flight to the Chinese city of Urumqi Generally it goes unreported that whilst the ethnic Uighur population is poverty stricken in comparison with the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang, the province is rich in oil and is China’s largest natural gas producer. The flight for self determination generally begins with a sense of injustice over the exploitation of natural resources for the financial gain of others.
We have already seen the first invasion by a European state perpetuated in the name of counter terrorism where the reality is the pursuit of natural resources. The French Operation Seval into its former territory of Mali in North Africa was instigated in order to defend the locals from the increasing Islamic militancy of the also-indigenous Tuareg tribes. This widely reported explanation seems somewhat opaque when you discover that Frances largest companies Areva and EDF maintain huge Uranium mines in Mali and neighbouring Niger, it is also worth noting that France is the most nuclear dependent nation on Earth. The French have no international mandate for continuing their military presence in Mali, there are simply defending their corporate interests from ‘resource terrorism’.
The western media whitewash on events in the Ukraine is not as watertight as it would have been in previous years, the media cracks are showing. The internet publishes images from the alternative media sources rapidly and access to a different take on international events is growing. What the non-mainstream media response to the disappearance of flight MH370 teaches us is that perhaps international terrorism has a new face, and now we have more awareness of this than ever before. It may not have been the root cause of this incident, but some time in the future, it will come. So called ‘resource terrorism’ is perhaps better explained as indigenous local populations demanding their share of the economic benefits from the sale of national assets. The violent methods they use to do it are not new, but the ideology the west cloaks them in is flimsier than ever.
The Sochi project was abandoned when the situation in Ukraine deteriorated rapidly. A growing sense of outrage prompted an analysis of the Western media’s chronically biased reporting of the developing story. We as a western, democratic society have to find a way of allowing our own media sources to objectively report news events within the former Soviet states. Instead, we continue to persist with allowing the conveniently simplistic whitewash of good versus evil, east versus west and the rehash of outdated cold war rhetoric.
Reading the mainstream news, it is obvious that we, the public, are meant to ignore the fact that the democratically elected leadership (however flawed) of a sovereign state had been overthrown by an armed, undefined opposition with possible links to the far right. Again we in the West are expected to unquestionably support these largely unidentified freedom fighters in their fight against the pro-Russian indigenous local population. Why is that exactly?
Further distraction from the Ukrainian project came in the form of the inexplicable disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. It was heart breaking watching the families and friends of all the passengers and crew who are still currently waiting even now, desperate and powerless, for news. In the face of mounting conspiracy theories, the human tragedy never got the media attention it deserves. The cruel indignity of moving the Chinese families out of their hotels to make way for the Malaysian Grand Prix was unforgivable. The incident itself, however, is highlighting new and important international patterns of power relations and structures. None of them, it would seem, are particularly positive.
I know nothing about transponders, radar pings, flight corridors or the intricacies of a Boeing 777, but a tour of the internet’s hidden corners has, as usual, been fascinating, There are plenty of people out these in cyber space who understand these things, or at least, think they do. Anyone with a spare three days should take a tour through the discussion forums on PPRuNe Forums. Anyone planning on a hijack could also get themselves a sophisticated masterclass on exactly how to do it. The days of a self policing internet will come to an end soon, and this is one of the classic examples why. Too much information can be a dangerous thing. Everybody seems to be aware of Tor nowadays, which means the onion has layers we don’t yet have access to.
There is no end to the level of complex speculation and theorising over what exactly has happened to this plane. For those living under a rock, Malaysian Airways Flight MH 370 took off from Kuala Lumpur airport on Saturday 8th March headed for its final destination Beijing. Approximately 1 hour after take off it supposedly ceased all communications with air traffic control. Since then we have had a number of false dawns, a massive search and rescue operation of unprecedented scale and, rather humiliatingly for the Malaysian government, a series of US linked leaks of investigative information. This culminated in an excruciatingly embarrassing press conference; http://www.theguardian.com/world/feedarticle/11247793 where the Malaysian government confirmed that the plane communications had been switched off deliberately and the plane had continued to fly for up to 7 hrs after it went off radar. This means the plane could be, well, precisely anywhere. We have had spy satellites from China, Australia and France locating debris in the Indian Ocean, yet despite an even more intensive air and sea search we have found nothing. Radar pings supposedly from the aircrafts fading black box have narrowed the search down to a smaller area but still no physical remnants of the plane have been found and still no explanation as to why the plane ended up there, if indeed it did.
The internet to conspiracy theorists is like a warm, damp, three week old tea towel is to bacteria: a fertile breeding ground. Here are my top ten favourites so far.
- The plane has been rendered invisible, the 20 employees on board from Freescale (US Semiconductor manufacturer) are experts in Israeli weapons defence shields. They made the plane disappear, for reasons known only to themselves.
- The 2 Iranian Asylum Seekers were actually old fashioned Jihadists and the plane is somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean but someone forgot to release the we-did-it-tape.
- The plane is at Diego Garcia, under the control of the Americans. The media have been carefully not questioning why, given that the US Navy’s largest radar and GPS set up is in the Indian Ocean, no actual debris has been found yet.
- The plane was hijacked by Chinese Uigher Terrorists and is somewhere near the Chinese border with Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan and the Chinese are currently negotiating. They would prefer a quiet end rather than another loss of face over increasing ethnic tensions within China. The current focus on the Indian ocean is merely an expensive smoke screen.
- The trigger happy Indians shot it down as soon as it entered their airspace fearing Pakistani military action against them, and an international sweep up is happening to avoid further embarrassment.
- The plane is in Pakistan being refuelled and reloaded with a nuclear bomb destined for the next available gathering of significant world leaders.
- As above only the plane is headed for London and it can’t be shot down on route over Europe as it’s full of nuclear fuel. The Americans already know this of course.
- The plane was nowhere near full with over 50 empty seats, yet the hold was overweight, ergo the hold was full of gold. All of which has now been stolen.
- The hijackers are Saudis and the US Navy have taken the plane down. Silence will follow to maintain diplomatic status quos.
- Somehow Russia must be blamed.
There are more, some even involving extra terrestrials. It is quite terrifying how quickly we can fill a vacuum with nonsense because we have become used to 24 hr news feeds and we expect technological answers. The theory that refuses to go away is that of the Chinese Uighurs.
We are so conditioned now that we cannot understand how this plane be cannot be found, ‘The Americans can track a bumble bee’, ‘We can trace anything with GPS’ etc etc. We think everything can be monitored, traced and electronically finger printed. We believe in and depend on technology like never before.
And we are correct. The plane is probably not missing at all. All that is happening is that we, the media watching public, simply do not know where it is. The Chinese military know where it is, and more than likely the American Commander in Chief and his CIA/FBI teams know where it is too. They don’t actually have to tell us anything. What has happened though, is a series of embarrassing information leaks and penetrations. Technology’s ubiquitous presence allows information to escape the control systems. For example the radar pings were found by a British domestic satellite company, INMARSAT who reported it immediately to the world’s media. The Malaysian Aviation Authorities are clearly well out of the loop and it showed.
However, too many leaks and confusions have followed and the situation has now moved on, the simple mechanical malfunction or pilot error isn’t a feasible explanation, all analysis seem to point to deliberate action. Answers will have to be given, they need not be the truth though. The next few months will pass and perhaps some actual debris will turn up in the Indian Ocean and perhaps the pilot with his Anwar-political-axe to grind will be blamed and we will move on. Except just like 9/11, we will not actually be able to move on. Instead, the conspiracy theorist will continue to fill the internet with ‘what-really-happened-theories’. Human nature loves a mystery and the internet tea-towel facilitates the spread of them. What is interesting is that this time the conspiracy theories, however crack pot, are showing a trend, ‘Resource Terrorism’.
It is a consistent core Yellowcake value that geopolitical power over natural resources is how the world works. Ethnic, religious and ideological conflicts are convenient fronts and excuses for a means to control the planets’ valuable natural resources. Oil, gas, metals and uranium are the tools of real power distribution and more valuable than money itself. They are also finite and their mined locations are frequently zones of conflict as a result. This is why these locations are increasingly a key factor in international terrorism.
The American approach to the Middle East is not new territory. The hypocritical approach to the Ukraine is staggering in the face of Afghanistan. The US government had no UN mandate, yet invaded Afghanistan 2001, two years later the same thing happened in Iraq. Russia, in the face of a government destabilised by a western backed mob, merely redistributed the 22,000 navel troops already based at Sevastopol round the Crimea to secure the ethnic Russian population and their strategic interests. The USA invasions of Iraq are about resources, i.e oil. The situation in Afghanistan has been less clear. Previously, control of the worlds largest unregulated financial market, opiates, would have been a major motivation for invasion. However, it now transpires that tiny-dirt-poor Afghanistan sits on the world’s largest untapped copper reserves: estimated at some $4bn.
The number of conspiracies for the disappearance of flight MH370 is huge, and most of them concern international terrorism: from Chinese Uighurs to Israeli engineers to Iranian Jihadists. Some of these groups have previous form. In February this year in Kunming South West China 29 people were stabbed to death and over 130 injured. The attack was blamed on Xinjiang Uighur separatists. In China the Xinjiang Uighurs are generally reported as criminals; vicious and murderous. Their potential involvement in the disappearance of flight MH 370 would however be a marked escalation in scale of terrorist act, but not unprecedented. In 2008 a failed suicide bombing was attempted on a China Southern Airlines flight. In 2011 six Uighur men attempted and failed to hijack a flight to the Chinese city of Urumqi Generally it goes unreported that whilst the ethnic Uighur population is poverty stricken in comparison with the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang, the province is rich in oil and is China’s largest natural gas producer. The flight for self determination generally begins with a sense of injustice over the exploitation of natural resources for the financial gain of others.
We have already seen the first invasion by a European state perpetuated in the name of counter terrorism where the reality is the pursuit of natural resources. The French Operation Seval into its former territory of Mali in North Africa was instigated in order to defend the locals from the increasing Islamic militancy of the also-indigenous Tuareg tribes. This widely reported explanation seems somewhat opaque when you discover that Frances largest companies Areva and EDF maintain huge Uranium mines in Mali and neighbouring Niger, it is also worth noting that France is the most nuclear dependent nation on Earth. The French have no international mandate for continuing their military presence in Mali, there are simply defending their corporate interests from ‘resource terrorism’.
The western media whitewash on events in the Ukraine is not as watertight as it would have been in previous years, the media cracks are showing. The internet publishes images from the alternative media sources rapidly and access to a different take on international events is growing. What the non-mainstream media response to the disappearance of flight MH370 teaches us is that perhaps international terrorism has a new face, and now we have more awareness of this than ever before. It may not have been the root cause of this incident, but some time in the future, it will come. So called ‘resource terrorism’ is perhaps better explained as indigenous local populations demanding their share of the economic benefits from the sale of national assets. The violent methods they use to do it are not new, but the ideology the west cloaks them in is flimsier than ever.